The connected economy is information-intensive. Maintaining an uninterrupted flow of information is important for many businesses and organizations in this environment. Additionally, maintaining accurate copies of information is important for businesses and organizations. Data protection and rapid data recovery is desired in the event of a disruptive event such as a power outage.
In one type of computing system, a master host (e.g., a server) is located at a master site and a remote host is located at a remote site. The remote host is typically geographically dispersed (e.g., several hundred miles) from the master host. Each host has its own associated storage system (e.g., a disk subsystem). Typically, in a remote copy system, the data contained in the master host is copied to the remote host. The network connecting the master host and the remote host is typically a Wide Area Network (WAN), such as the Internet.
When running a remote copy procedure so that identical data is stored in the disk subsystem(s) on the master site and the disk subsystem(s) on the remote site, the network administrator first initiates an initial copy procedure so that data is copied from the master site to the remote site. Various known methods are used to copy data from the master site to the remote site. However, if the data to be copied is large in amount, then the time required for copying will be longer in length. For example, to copy 100 Tera bytes of data by using a network of 100 Megabytes/sec will require 11.57 days.
In addition, an initial copy procedure requires interruption of the host input/output functions.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,742,792 and 6,173,377 each discloses two data storage systems that are interconnected by a data link for remote mirroring of data. A host computer directly accesses a primary volume, and data that is written to the primary volume is automatically sent over the link to a corresponding secondary volume. However, these references only disclose providing a copy from the primary volume to the secondary volume by use of the network link.
Other references related to data transmission are the following. The “Fibre Channel Physical And Signaling Interface (FC-PH) Rev. 4.3” standard describes the point-to-point physical interface, transmission protocol, and signaling protocol of a high-performance serial link for support of higher level protocols associated with High-Performance Parallel Interface (HPPI), Intelligent Peripheral Interface (IPI), Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), and other standards. The “Fibre Channel Switch Fabric (FC-SW) Rev. 3.3” standard specifies tools and algorithms for interconnection and initialization of fibre channel switches to create a multi-switch fibre channel fabric. The SCSI standards are several standards defined by the American National Standard for Information Technology (ANSI). SCSI Primary Command 2 (SPC-2) is one of the standards of SCSI. SPC-2 contains the second-generation definition of the basic commands for all SCSI devices.
There is a need for a system and method that will overcome the above-mentioned deficiencies of conventional methods and systems. There is also a need for a system and method that will increase the efficiency of performing the initial copy procedure in a disk subsystem environment.